I don't know Desmond Child....but i actually don't mind band's using other songwriters...as I can imagine it's easy for your creativity to get stiffled when trapped with the same 3 or 4 people for decades. Although it depends - in some cases you'd be changing a magic formula already - but i'm just saying - while its cool when bands write their own shit - i think zakk's recent comments went a bit far

omg what a choice. I love both these films. I'm going with indy cos it altered my whole life growing up...but hell if i'd had as good a batman movie as TDK back then. Gulp.

I look at it like this:

Robin leaves to go on tour with NIN - catches them kind of by surprise.
GNR don't really know what his intention is but at that stage the focus was on getting the album deal done so it didn't matter too much. GNR make statements that they dont know what he's doing (which surely gives a signal that if he wants to come back he should have a chat). They leave some time. Robin doesn't come back. The album comes out. Still no sign from Robin. Axl comes online and says he's interested in touring in theory, but that he doesn't have any fixed plans yet. More time elapses, still nothing from robin. So the band appoints DJ as a first step to looking at a future tour. Rehersals take place. Something then happens that causes a delay - either problems nutting out details of the tour - or Axl is upset about stuff ala the Azoff rumour - or whatever else - and it's all been put on hold for a while. But when Axl feels better, or when the details are sorted, it seems like the next thing that would happen would be a tour. I could be wrong...but it just seemed the chain of events points that way.

Just in case you're legit....

100% true. DJ hasn't played on a stage with GNR yet so he has no presence

I think Robin has great stage presence, but I think DJ's style will suit the band well and hopefully he'll also have some charms on stage. Time will tell.

The TIL solo has it's moments to me, there's a lot of feeling in it and I like that. There's no way I would rate it the #1 solo of all time though. But for that matter I wouldn't rate any solo as #1 from any one artist. It's a question of finding the perfect solo for each song. There's a collection of solos that I think are amongst the best ever, but rating one against another at that level gets silly, as one may be technically harder but not have suited another song...and so forth. It's all about how they are used.

Not to sound like an Axl nutswinger....but it wasn't axl who got rid of robin. He left to rejoin NIN. And by some accounts he left without really explaining what he intended. He was off in NIN for the better part of a year before a replacement was announced either. so I'd say he had his chance to sort out whatever was going on between them.